This article adopts a reflexive perspective of research that focuses on institutional discourse and relies on an ongoing work on the notion of "authoritative discourse". The paper proposes a double approach by taking in consideration the French trends in discourse analysis as well as the information and communication sciences. First, the paper reminds us that discourse analysis may be considered–if not exactly as an institutionalized "discipline"–as a field of research, linked in several ways to the issue of interdisciplinarity. The reflection follows three lines, each of them addressing a specific interdisciplinary configuration, where different points of theoretical and methodological elaborations are at stake. The first concerns the reflection on the "context" of the saying, the second addresses the dialogue between "disciplines of speech", the third focuses on the "return" to disciplines that were founding partners of discourse analysis.

The author proposes to designate two fundamental paradigms whose explicitation and articulation appear to be required (though not sufficient) to enable a genuine sociological turn to discourse analyses practiced by French sociologists, often influenced either by sociolinguistics and/or by computing and statistics-especially when it comes to lexicometric practices. The first is the paradigm of "instances of discursive practices" in mutual interaction within a "circulatory" system. The second is the paradigm of the four main "meaning registers" or "fundamental constituent dimensions" of any discursive-linguistic expression. For each of these paradigms, methodological applications are briefly illustrated. Finally, this methodological reflection can not avoid questioning the assumptions of the temporal dimension, and so through the ontogenetic philosophy of Gilbert Simondon, and can not fail to mention the fundamental paradigm of social dominance relationships-considered by the author as constituting any sociological problem.

This article illustrates various possible epistemological definitions of discourse, called discourse statuses, based on an emerging analysis of discourse published in the press during the Maple Spring. After discussing discourse statuses with respect to methodological choices and calling attention to the criticism aimed at content analysis, the text questions these statuses. What type of relationship is being entertained between the world and the discourse? Answers vary according to whether this discourse is examined from the perspective of the intentions expressed by the speakers, the actions performed by the discourse itself, the representations that are activated, the devices of mediation, and the relayed symbols or ideologies. In illustrating these statuses, the discourse both dematerializes and anchors itself in words, wavers on the boundaries of linguistic features to touch upon other forms of semiosis, integrates psycho-social mapping, and becomes a vehicle for external and collective memories. This comparison of viewpoints on discourse statuses reinforces epistemological considerations regarding the interdisciplinary productiveness of discourse analysis.

Discourse analysis implies a preliminary gesture of categorization, from which various typologies of discourse can be issued, in order to extract from the world’s noise proper corpus to be analyzed. Yet the phenomenon of discursive circulation and interdiscursivity shows us that beyond the initial need to categorize (which is necessary for the analysis), social discourses participate in each other, questioning the types/genres of discourse that serve their analysis. Examining this paradox, this article proposes a reflection on the notion of discursive circulation and the process of inter-discursive re-signification. Through the analysis of the contemporary advertising and anti-advertisement discourse in France, we will see how two opposite types of discourse mutually re-signify each other, to the point where we have to change our perspective from an architectural and typological conception of discourse to the vision of a large weft of discursive threads in interaction.

What methods of discourse analysis are relevant to investigate oral argumentative dialogical practices? We focus on the study of a debate between students who are in their fourth year in a French secondary school. This corpus is part of a project for citizenship education to nanotechnologies. The confrontation of theoretical fields (Socially Acute Questions didactics, language sciences and didactics of French first language leads us to propose a study of a reasoned debate among students on SAQ related to nanotechnologies. We present the advantages and limitations of a thematic content analysis (Bardin, 1977) and of an argumentative discourse analysis (Plantin, 1996).We propose a new analysis of oral language interactions, called thematic-argumentative analysis. It enables to study topics in a temporal perspective as the debate unfolds and to account for the argumentative orientation of the utterances. It refers to new concepts to analyse argumentative moments.

Noting the focus of the French tradition in discourse analysis on textometric softwares, the author attempts to model the fundamental processes underlying the analyst-text interaction distinguishing the modes, operations, dimensions, granularity, contextuality and temporalities of the process, and so, with or without recourse to computer processing. Based on this modeling, textometric softwares show that the assistance of the researcher is often a matter of bringing to display, through queries-retrieval, automatic assignments and representations, textual and extra-textual data, but rarely a matter of assisting the researcher in his working of the text (e.g. customized annotations, multiplicity of reading layers, corpus evolution) to produce and construct meaning by his or her analysis traces in an integrated environment. The origins of this trend are discussed as well as directions for future developments.

This text answers the following main interrogation: if we consider the New Rhetoric as paradigmatic field of the Discourse Analysis, then on which principle does it base, which directs it and which justifies its heuristic relevance? We begin at first to show that the New Rhetoric is the paradigm which is suitable to the Discourse Analysis. Then, we evaluate the heuristic relevance of the New Rhetoric by revealing the insufficiency of the principle of widened reason on which it base. That allows proposing another concept of reason which makes possible a really descriptive analysis of the discursive practices.

This text aims at showing the interest, if not the necessity, for social sciences to comprehend discourse as an object among others that, consequently, may be split, de-constructed and analyzed positively. In fact, the “linguistic materiality” of discourse is both thick and opaque and the analyst needs technical tools (linguistic, narrative, stylistic, computational,etc.) to describe it. We have given a brief survey of the diverging traditions, anglo-saxon and linguistic, of discourse analysis, and their common concern for its “materiality”. We have then presented a few analytic tools, and lastly in a third part, we have reintroduced the choice of these tools depending of subject matter and the researcher’s aims.